19^th July 2025

The move south happened so gradually that it almost escaped my notice. A conversation became a proposal, the proposal became a meeting in Charlotte, and before long the paper had decided that southern football deserved its own permanent desk instead of being covered by whoever happened to be closest. I remember standing in our kitchen in Kansas City with my wife, Emily, surrounded by half-packed boxes while our son, Noah, crawled through them as though cardboard was a perfectly sensible substitute for toys. The decision felt larger than a change of address, though nobody said as much. We were exchanging familiar streets for unfamiliar ones, neighbours we’d known for years for strangers whose names we would learn one mailbox at a time, and a city that had become home for one that existed, at that point, only as a dot on an interstate map. Athens, Georgia, happened to fall neatly along the route, and with football waiting there on a warm July evening, it seemed as good a place as any to remind myself why I’d first agreed to spend so much of my life on the road.

Some parts of America always announce themselves from behind the windshield before they ever appear on a welcome sign. The flat certainty of Kansas gave way to softer hills, gas stations where the same country songs faded in and out with the radio signal, and billboards advertising peaches, fireworks and churches with equal confidence. I had driven enough miles by then to know that every exit promised the same handful of franchises, yet every small town somehow arranged them differently, as though trying to leave its own fingerprint on the interstate. I stopped more often than I needed to, filling the rental car with gasoline that it barely required simply because stretching my legs had become part of travelling. The attendants were invariably interested in where I was headed rather than where I’d come from, and somewhere in Tennessee I realised that people in the South rarely asked what you did before they asked whether you’d eaten.

Athens arrived quietly beneath a canopy of trees. It carried the confidence of a university town without the self-importance that sometimes accompanies one, and the closer I wandered towards downtown the more it reminded me of photographs from my father’s family albums. My grandmother’s people had come from just north of Manchester, England, and although I had only visited as a boy, the old brick mills on the edge of Athens stirred something that had slept for years. Cotton had replaced textiles, Georgia had replaced Lancashire, yet there was something familiar about rows of weathered brick standing patiently beside newer glass buildings, refusing to disappear simply because time had moved on. Nostalgia is an unreliable guide, but it often arrives before reason has a chance to object.

I spent most of the afternoon walking around the University of Georgia campus after falling into conversation with a history lecturer while we waited for coffee. He had the gentle habit of answering questions with another story rather than a fact, leading me first to the lonely steeple of St. Mary’s Church, where he explained that a young local band called R.E.M. had once played some of its earliest shows nearby, and then across campus towards the memorial honouring Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, the first Black students admitted to the university in 1961. We stood there for longer than either of us intended. I thought about my own college years at the University of Kansas, where lecture halls had looked remarkably diverse in brochures but less so once classes actually began, and I wondered how many histories I had walked past without ever noticing because they had never asked anything of me. The lecturer never preached. He simply thanked me for listening before disappearing into another building, leaving me with the uncomfortable sense that learning rarely ends when graduation does.

Lunch came at a roadside diner just beyond the ring road, where three generations of the same family appeared to work without anyone ever explaining who was in charge. An elderly woman slid a plate of biscuits and gravy across the counter with the confidence of someone who had made the same recipe thousands of times, while her grandson apologised for the wait despite the restaurant being only half full. Nobody seemed in a hurry. The conversations drifted from college football recruiting to rainfall and back again, and every customer leaving the diner seemed to know somebody they hadn’t expected to see. Places like that never advertise themselves as institutions. They simply survive long enough to become one.

Football did not occupy Athens in the way it occupied Atlanta. There were no giant video boards towering over the skyline, no crowds arriving on packed trains, no sense that the entire city revolved around ninety minutes on a Saturday evening. Holland Youth Sports Complex felt entirely comfortable with its place in the world, tucked among ordinary fields where children still played earlier in the day, and perhaps because of that there was less pressure for it to pretend to be something grander. Families unfolded camping chairs beside supporters carrying homemade scarves, and conversations about the Georgia Bulldogs drifted naturally into conversations about whether soccer might finally be finding its own audience here. Nobody spoke as though one game would change everything. They simply kept showing up.

By then I had watched enough football to notice patterns without fully understanding them. Athens seemed to arrange themselves one way when they had possession and another when they lost it, players exchanging places almost instinctively until I found myself looking at the wrong man because somebody else had quietly occupied the space I expected him to fill. Earlier in the year I might have assumed they were making mistakes. Now I suspected the mistake belonged to me. The match itself was lively, Athens winning comfortably enough, but what interested me most was not the score so much as the confidence with which players solved problems I’d only just begun to recognise. Football was becoming less mysterious without becoming any less fascinating.

After the final whistle, I followed the slow procession of cars away from the complex until dawn caught me crossing the old Smith McGee Iron Bridge over the Savannah River. The first light settled softly across the rusted steel, turning the river beneath it into a sheet of pale gold while the bridge itself remained stubbornly dark, carrying decades of history without asking anybody to admire it. I pulled over for only a minute, leaning against the rental car as birds began to wake somewhere beyond the trees, and realised how much of the past the South seemed willing to carry into the present. Some of it inspired pride. Some of it demanded honesty. Most of it simply waited for people to notice it. By the time I pointed the car towards Charlotte, with a new home waiting and another season of roads stretching ahead, Athens no longer felt like a stop between two places. It felt like the place where I finally understood that journeys change not only because the miles accumulate, but because, if you’re paying attention, so do the questions you ask yourself along the way